July 29, 2009

Round 2: Nick Flynn's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

For today, I asked poet and memoiristNick Flynn to share his favorite covers with us. Oh so different from Don Share's choices. Whereas Don has chosen classic covers, strong, graphic, architectural, typographical covers that tilt their way towards the intertextual and the satiric, Nick has chosen covers that have no such sense of jovial calm. His three seethe with color and torqued forms. They are vexed, lush, unruly.

Nick's choices may at first appear diverse, ranging from the dark, unsettling, biological
(Powell), to the neo-punk, as if Vivienne Westwood inflected (Wolff) or
to the vibrant, scrawly, and childlike (Howe). But they share a strong, baroque sense of pattern, and reveal themselves as a group to be what I would call late-Hellenic in style: ornate, ordered images about to burst into disorder.

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Round 2: Nick Flynn's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

For today, I asked poet and memoiristNick Flynn to share his favorite covers with us. Oh so different from Don Share's choices. Whereas Don has chosen classic covers, strong, graphic, architectural, typographical covers that tilt their way towards the intertextual and the satiric, Nick has chosen covers that have no such sense of jovial calm. His three seethe with color and torqued forms. They are vexed, lush, unruly.

Nick's choices may at first appear diverse, ranging from the dark, unsettling, biological
(Powell), to the neo-punk, as if Vivienne Westwood inflected (Wolff) or
to the vibrant, scrawly, and childlike (Howe). But they share a strong, baroque sense of pattern, and reveal themselves as a group to be what I would call late-Hellenic in style: ornate, ordered images about to burst into disorder.